Martin Swig and the 53 Hours of Lamé: In praise of the omnivores who enrich our lives

Finding out on Thursday that Martin Swig had died at age 78 inspired a bout of reflectivity. I mused on my brief interactions with the irrepressible Swig, about the impact he had on the car hobby and about my own relationship to it. Swig was an automotive omnivore, committed to fun. Which got me thinking about my friend Habitat.

Imagine a bar-brawling, rapping, roller-derby lesbian with a shock of skater-boy blonde hair and skin pale enough to make the Venus de Milo resemble some bizarro monument to a double-amputee Snooki. To that heady mélange, add Midwestern preacher's-daughter family values, a mile-wide humanitarian streak, a penchant for weepy emo songs and the ability to charm the pants off of just about anyone she meets. She's going to school to be an aircraft mechanic. Before that, she was studying to become a doctor.

Suffice to say, Habs is a singular character. So when she comes to town, I try to pull something appropriate from the press fleet. Her last visit coincided with the arrival of a Land Rover Range Rover Evoque, a machine I'd only briefly experienced on an off-road course set up in the bluffs above the Quail Lodge. I didn't feel as though I had enough of a sense of it, especially since my colleagues had voted it Best of the Best for 2011 right before I joined the Autoweek staff.

Let's face it. Range Rover stresses the CUV's off-road credentials in the service of the brand's reputation, but the Evoque was built for city-slang profiling. And in that regard, it's the best machine of its ilk I've ever driven. It's nimble, adequately powerful and has enough room to stash a stowaway in the cargo area during an evening of dance-club hijinks, plus a stereo built for blaring Carly Rae Jepsen's No. 1 summer jam, “Call Me Maybe.”

It may not quite be the all-class experience Gerry McGovern envisioned when he etched the car's shape into the mirror-mounted puddle lamps, but the utelet was absolutely perfect for a ribald, obnoxious night on the town. Even if that town happens to be sleepy, dowdy Sacramento. Land Rover did, after all, hire a Spice Girl to gin up a special edition of the Evoque. Under all of that cool-Britania reserve, trashy, loud-and-proud hijinks are clearly part of the menu.

Last weekend, Habitat appeared again. We'd cooked up a plan to surprise my girlfriend, Ashley, more often known by her roller-derby sobriquet, Trailor Trashley—an oblique reference to both her colorful Virginia childhood and her love of the magical-girl anime series Sailor Moon. Yes, derby names can be kind of contorted.

I had a black Chrysler 300 S at my disposal. The red leather interior, the blacked-out everything else and the Beats by Dr. Dre stereo lent the car a serious G-funk stank. Trash and I immediately put the good Doctor's sound system to use, bumping Rebecca Black's “Friday” and the Misfits' “20 Eyes.”

When we picked up Habitat at the airport, Ashley was wearing a ridiculous trollopy matador outfit she'd scored while managing a Halloween store. As soon as Habs got into the car, Trash demanded that she don a specific gold lamé dress that made her resemble a disheveled woman of ill repute.

“You want me to put it on now?”

“Yes, now!”

So on the nigh-crimson rear bench of a Chrysler hurtling east on I-80, Habitat poured herself into the dress. Ashley then forbade her to take it off for the remainder of her stay. After a stop at Jack in the Box, we proceeded to pay questionable tribute to musical heroes at our favorite karaoke night. Yes, I was dressed as a Boy Scout from Brooklyn's Troop 20. What of it? At least I got to hang up the khaki shirt at the end of the night. Habs was stuck in that disco-infernal dress for 53 hours. She even showered in it.

The other night, Ashley and I sat on the porch talking. I said, “You know, before you and I started dating, I was totally in pretty much the same musical bubble I'd been in for the past decade and a half.”

She replied, “I was in a bubble, too, until I met Habitat. When that girl's skating around singing Usher and doing the dance moves on skates and she picks you to sing to, you can't help but get into it.”

There's a Hold Steady lyric I love. It's simple, plaintive and forceful. And almost true: “Raise a toast to Saint Joe Strummer. I think he might've been our only decent teacher.”

When I was 23, I had the good fortune to spend a couple of evenings with Strummer. Once was an interview for the punkzine my friends and I ran. The second time, he spotted me at the Fillmore and said, “Hey! You're coming up for a drink after the show, right?” Of course I was. How does one decline an invitation from the man who fronted The Clash?

Thirteen years later, those evenings still stick out. Joe's voice, full of humor and righteousness, still crackles clear in my ears. I mention that the above Hold Steady lyric is almost true because Swig was another teacher. He'd been everywhere and driven everything, but he was hardly a snob. He reminded us to have fun with our cars, no matter how cheap or expensive, rare or pedestrian. He was a champion of everything from Bugattis to Datsuns.

During one conversation, Swig admonished me for discussing vehicles as if they were all loaded press cars. He said, “Go get in a basic Nissan Altima. It's a wonderful car.”

A few weeks later, I cadged one from the local press fleet and spent some time bombing around Monterey in it. Four naturally aspirated cylinders, a CVT and about as much grip as a pair of tap shoes on a frozen lake. But Swig was right. There's an essential simple goodness to the 2012 Altima that I hope doesn't get ironed out of the '13.

The unifying science dropped by the rapping aircraft mechanic, the calypso-DJ punker and the car dealer-turned-rally organizer? Life's a palette to be sampled from liberally and extensively. Swig more than once held the up the Subaru SVX as a sterling example of motoring greatness. In the Comments section with Mark Vaughn's obit, reader Richard Chen recalled Swig's purchase of his 1983 Supra. Swig said to him at the time, “People like you and me, we like a little bit of everything.”

Those who change and create things—the ones who stand out and inspire the rest of us—tend to be human Hoovers. They're people who suck up experiences and ideas and combine them in new ways. They encourage us to progress on levels micro, macro and in between. Sometimes they're you're friends. Sometimes they're your coworkers, family members or bandmates. But get this—they're always your teachers.

In the end, Swig was a proponent of having fun in a car. It didn't necessarily matter what car. There's an adage in photography: “The best camera is the one you have on you at the time.” By that measure, the best cars I've driven this year are the Range Rover Evoque, the Chrysler 300S and the Porsche 911 Carrera S that I used to cover the California Mille.

They stand as the best because while driving them, I got to spend time with people who made me stop, who made me take stock. And, most of all, Habitat and Martin reminded me—in all of their scrappy, curmudgeonly grandeur—to enjoy what I've got and what I'm doing right now.

In honor of that spirit, in tribute to Martin Swig, why not get in your car this weekend and do something new? Bonus points if you do it while shamelessly and proudly rocking a gold lamé dress.